About

This two-day multidisciplinary conference will explore the role of green man and wild man motifs in twentieth and twenty-first century children’s culture. From Puck to Captain Planet, the green man motif may help to kindle ecological awareness and excite the environmental imagination. The green man offers education and guidance and a release from the pressures and responsibilities of the civic space. Yet the spaces the green man inhabits – forests and wildernesses – are also sites of wild abandon, savagery and panic where human characters become wild men and slip away from their civilised identities altogether. From Craighead George’s My Side of the Mountain, to Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are, to Linda Newbery Lob, to Almond’s The Savage, to Siobhan Dowd and Patrick Ness’s A Monster Calls, the motif of the wild child and the wild man pervades twentieth and twenty-first century children’s culture. This conference will celebrate all aspects of the green man and the wild man in children’s culture.